Brings forth the fiftieth and last of its great novels of the twentieth century, a resolutely head-spinning inquisition of a book by Italo Calvino, one that keeps introducing a novel titled If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. In this, the coldest week in Munich in twenty years, the series not only takes notice of [...]

I’m still thinking about Vienna. I didn’t especially like the anti aircraft towers, but I think the toilets were excellent.
I am quite serious. You see this is a problem for transatlantic comprehension. In the USA toilets have a large pool of water. This can cause an unfortunate problem called [...]

Heraclitis said that you can not step in the same river twice.
Wolfgang Pauli said that you can not be an identical fermion twice
that is that there can’t be two identical fermions.
Some Heraclitian said that you can’t step in the same river once.
This is clearly silly.
Similarly, I think that an honest application of the basic assumptions [...]

These are my impressions of a recent trip to Budapest.
My father’s parents grew up in Budapest. The Waldmann family has returned on 5 or so occasions. Caroly, Erzebeth and Thomas (dad) went back in 1937 to tell the folks it was time to bug out of central Europe (they didn’t listen). [...]

This sounds like it should be one of Harry Hutton’s Killer Facts but did you know that until tonight there’s never been a full stage production of The Sound Of Music performed in Austria? On top of that, the film has never been shown in Austrian cinemas (and only once on Austrian TV).
Which is a [...]

A thought on my month in Vienna (in 1987).
A very nice clean safe city full of nice people. However there are two extremely ugly buildings in Vienna. I tried to find a photo googling Vienna skyline but they seem to have been carefully kept off the web. They are huge [...]

It’s still not certain who will lead the government in Germany’s northernmost state of Schleswig-Holstein. Neither the Social Democrat-Green coalition nor the Christian Democrat-Free Democrat coalition won a majority of seats in the election this past Sunday, and talks on all manner of variants are continuing.
What’s certain is that the far-right NPD — which had [...]

The always readable Timothy Garton Ash has another good column in today’s Guardian discussing how Europe’s inability to speak with one voice on the international stage weakens its impact. As he points out, the sheer number of people waiting to meet with President Bush this week help to show what the problem is:
Who knows what [...]

Europe’s history is littered with questions, some answered, some left unanswered for centuries. For those of you interested in the Schleswig-Holstein question, Randy McDonald has an interesting post on how the remaining Danish and Frisian minority in Schleswig-Holstein could hold the state’s balance of power after Sunday’s elections and how that could affect the politics [...]

We have’t given that much attention to President Bush’s visit to Europe, but the good thing about blogging is that there’s always someone to pick up your slack, so check The Periscope for updates and links to coverage of what’s happening.